THATCHER, REAGAN AND JOHN PAUL II

“The trouble with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.” – Margaret Thatcher

In the Great Britain of the late 1970s, the labor unions ran the country. There was economic malaise, garbage in the streets and a pervasive pessimism. At the same time in the United States, Jimmy Carter’s presidency had yielded 20 percent interest rates, huge inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis, fueling the national self-doubt that was a hangover from Vietnam.

The America of 1979 reminds one of America today, with its debt crisis, high taxes and lack of economic growth. But it was that year that the pendulum began to swing back from statism and socialism and toward freedom. Margaret Thatcher was elected British prime minister. The next year, Americans elected Ronald Reagan as president.

Working with John Paul II, the Polish cardinal who in 1978 had become the youngest pope in more than a century, these leaders remade the world by taking on communism and sharply hastening its collapse.

Thatcher and Reagan ended the march toward socialism in Britain and America and stood up to unions, weakening their viselike grip on many industries. They trumpeted their belief in freedom, free enterprise, opportunity and moral values, and their conviction that strength would bring peace.

Before long, Thatcher’s embrace of the free market created a huge, sustained economic boom in Britain and the emergence of an entrepreneurial middle class. In America, Reagan lowered taxes and jump-started the sluggish economy. He also rebuilt the military and faced down the Soviet “evil empire,” standing with Europe against Moscow’s bullying and setting the stage for the end of the Cold War.

But now, a third of a century since the Thatcher-Reagan-John Paul II revolution began, the pendulum has swung back to the left in the United States – to those who believe that government is the answer and that entrepreneurs “didn’t build that,” to those who sneer at conventional morality and values.

In California, this mindset has led to the absolutely irrational belief that high taxes and heavy regulation help, not hurt, the economy. The majority party in Sacramento believes every problem has one solution: higher taxes.

In Washington, this mindset has produced a president, Barack Obama, who argues with a straight face that there is nothing wrong with a federal government that spends 40 percent more than it takes in year after year; a president whose signature accomplishment, Obamacare, is an immensely expensive, counterproductive nightmare; a president with 1,000 times more faith in bureaucrats than business owners.

We see none of Thatcher’s steely indomitability, Reagan’s optimism and Irish smile, John Paul II’s moral leadership. Yet we are confident that in time, the lessons of history will be heeded, and the free nations of the world will choose freedom and free enterprise over coercion and government.

But we would be far more confident if we looked around America and the world and saw leaders more like the giants of a generation ago.